


Dragged Along For The Ride

by LaceLich



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Bucky Barnes Has PTSD, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Canon-Typical Violence, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Earth-1218, I'm Bad At Summaries, Implied Relationships, It's Not Paranoia If They're Really Out To Get You, Marvel Multiverse Exists, Multi, Not Canon Compliant, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Other Ships Not Mentioned in Tags, Tags Contain Spoilers, The Author Regrets Nothing, This Is Not Going To Go The Way You Think, Trapped in another world
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-03
Updated: 2020-03-03
Packaged: 2021-02-23 03:34:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,064
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23005084
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LaceLich/pseuds/LaceLich
Summary: Otherwise known under the working title: Brain Slushy.Emily Johnson had just wanted to go shopping. Instead, she's found herself in another universe altogether... seven years behind and half a country away. Trapped in a world that had only existed in movies and comic books, with no discernible way home, Emily is forced to make life work in a world that doesn't think she exists on paper...Even if that means helping the Winter Soldier hide from the world to do it.Canon compliant to end of Captain America: The Winter Soldier.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Original Female Character(s)
Comments: 7
Kudos: 24





	Dragged Along For The Ride

**Author's Note:**

> This story exists because I feel bad for Bucky Barnes and want him to have one (1) good thing in his life. So I made Emily Johnson, a woman from our world who has the spinal fortitude of a wet noodle. Expect this to go in weird ways, especially since this fic only continues to exist because I ended up joining an erotica Discord.

There was a strange stain under the couch, the kind you moved furniture all around to keep your guests from seeing. It matched the crusty brown rings that spread across the yellowed and peeling ceiling above the cheap hostel couch she laid on. The cushions crinkled when she moved, and she tried not to think about the overall sanitation of the room she stayed in. For nineteen dollars and fifteen cents a night on her prepaid Visa card, she had achieved some semblance of refuge in the disaster she had found herself in.

At least for one night anyway. She had only had forty dollars in her wallet and loaded as much onto the cheap card as she could, buying a small cup of coffee in a cafe in order to sponge off the free WiFi to get the hostel room in the first place. Her phone hadn’t worked without WiFi, not since that-

She tried not to think about what had happened. Thinking about it wasn’t going to solve anything or make her life any better. The only thing that thinking about It would accomplish was making her worry even more than she already was.

Dozens of movies had prepared her for this moment, not that she had ever thought she was going to need any of that knowledge. Her best plan was to blend in, settle down and find some variety of a system to keep her safe until she could figure out what had happened.

The clock on her phone was wrong, so wrong, set backward like a bad time travel movie and she can’t stand to look at it. November 10th, 2013 was not the date she had woken up to that morning before It had happened, and there was only so much she could handle before she went mad.

Her phone had gotten her strange looks, so she tried to keep acting like her smartphone was just as normal as the old retro chunky smartphones that passed for fashionable. It hadn’t worked as well as she wanted it to, and so she mostly kept her phone buried deep in the bottom of her purse. At least her purse was normal: a nondescript black canvas thing that had seen her through half of college and a good chunk of the decade beyond. Nothing about her seemed exceptional, down from the riot of curls on her head to the tips of her well-worn sneakers. Just a normal woman, minding her own business and playing tourist in the great and glorious capital of the good old U.S. of A.

Somehow she’d lost almost seven years in the space of a single breath.

But that didn’t matter, not when the threat of questionable homelessness loomed like Damocles’ sword over her head. Could she be considered homeless if she wasn’t a real person in the first place?

She stretched on the couch, ignored the crinkle and crunch so she could scroll through every job posting she could find. This job required a cover letter, that one demanded three professional and three personal references. She could provide a reference. But she wasn’t sure that the call would go through to the same person on the other line and, even if it did, she wasn’t sure that person would even know her name.

She took a screenshot of every ad she found that said it wanted her to apply in person, handmade signs taped to windows that said ‘help wanted for positions on the spot’. Donut shops and boutiques were ignored in place of jobs where she would walk away with cash on the spot. There were a few restaurants and cafes that had signs posted that very day, and she smiled to herself as she gathered up her belongings and headed out the door.

The bus ticket was two dollars in change scrounged out of the bottom of her purse, quarters clinking in the metal pan as she swung herself up into a seat and tried to ignore the attention of the weird homeless man talking to himself in the back. Google maps still worked, and she had been smart enough to download the offline directions for the restaurant closest to the hostel she was staying in.

It was a tourist trap. Full of screaming babies and Boomers with their cameras hung around their necks, the little hole in the wall had been swarmed for the pre-lunch rush. Its decor was a curious mix of Americana memorabilia and cozy cottage pieces, the walls bright and the lights even brighter. There was no one truly free to answer her questions about the sign in the window but a frazzled hostess who looked like she had seen the end of days and still clocked in that morning. “Can I help you?”

She tightened her grip on her purse, mouth suddenly dry. “I’m here about the waitress gig?”

“Oh thank God,” muttered the tired blonde as she scooped up a tattered notebook and a pen. “You’re late, but whatever. Tables over there are your section. One of the tables is totally a Karen, and they’ve been waiting for ten minutes.” She thrust the notebook and pen at the confused woman before she turned her back and plastered the most plastic of smiles on her face. “Hi! Table for how many?” Clearly she thought Emily was someone else. 

A small group of people looked expectantly at her, and she forced herself to smile with the exact same level of plastic cheer that the hostess had managed. “Hi! I’m Emily, and I’ll be your server today. Follow me!”

Waiting tables was something she could do, had done before, and would do again. She could dance around tables with a full tray balanced on one arm and a pitcher of water in the other hand. Managing ten tables in a busy tourist trap restaurant was easy, especially when she could remember each table by how many orders of chicken fingers with fries had been ordered by the screaming children at each table.

She found a waist apron somewhere, stole a pen for receipt book, scooped her tips into her apron pocket, and tried her best to keep cups full and tables cycling. There was no time to think, no space to breathe, only mindless cheer and the smell of burgers permeating the air. Her feet ached from standing and rushing about the restaurant for hours upon untold hours. She had only stopped to drink a few glasses of water and bolt down a couple of chicken fingers one of the cooks had foisted off on her at some point during the neverending shift.

“Emily?” One of the other waitresses, the kind one with the bright blue eyes that had shown Emily where the aprons were, waved her over with a nonchalant flip of her hand. “You’ve been out here for six hours. You wanna take a break? It is your first day after all.”

She could feel the tiny stack of crinkled bills buried in her apron pocket, and Emily gave a weak smile back. “Thanks. I’d love to.” The other young woman beckoned her towards the back with an impatient finger before pointing to a tiny little room just off the kitchen that was cluttered with paperwork and a computer old enough for its white plastic shell to have turned yellow. Emily flopped down into the only chair not covered in paperwork with a heavy sigh. She rubbed her fingers across the arch of her nose, almost going cross-eyed in her attempt to curb the coming headache.

It had been a long time since she had waited on tables. A part-time job of bussing and balancing plates in college had kept the lights on when her scholarships just wouldn’t cover it, but it was a skill much akin to riding a bicycle. That didn’t keep her feet from aching, and she longed to rub at the arches of her feet to ease the tension.

Instead, she counted her tips. Counted once, then a second time because she couldn’t believe the number that came out.

“It’s nine fifty an hour, plus tips if you want it,” came a sudden voice, gravely with what sounded like years of heavy smoking. “I don’t remember hiring you though.”

Emily could feel her skeleton trying to jump out of her skin, and she slapped a hand over her heart as she gasped and fell backward out of the chair. The owner of the voice just waited, and Emily finally dared to crack her eyes open to see who had caught her in the act.

The woman was skinny, skin wrinkled and sagged in all the right places to suggest that she had lived a full life. One with joy and far too much laughter, if the crow’s feet and laugh lines had anything to say about it. She wore her crisp steel-grey hair in a no-nonsense braid, coiled around the base of her skull in a tight bun. Wizened eyes sat beneath a raised and heavy brow, and Emily winced at the scowl that stretched across the woman’s face. “I’d have remembered hiring you. So who are you and what are you doing in my restaurant?”

Emily sighed, pulled herself back up into the chair even as the woman leaned on the doorframe. “I… I need a job.”

The woman snorted. “No shit. And the sky’s blue.” She crossed her arms over her chest and motioned with one wrinkled brown hand to continue.

This was the sort of woman that ran entire families, the matriarch to beat all matriarchs that ruled the southern bayous with an iron grip. Emily was far too familiar with the concept, and she automatically felt her spine straighten as she stared the woman down. “I’m sorry ma’am. I was looking for a job and saw the sign in your window. I asked the hostess about it and I think she assumed I was supposed to start a trial shift today.”

The woman snorted again, rolled her eyes and shook her head slowly. “I’ll be damned. For once she did something right.” An imperious wave of her hand had Emily bolting out of the chair to offer the wizened woman her throne. Nearly skeletal fingers reached out for the little pile of tips, and she licked her thumb before counting the dollars once and then twice again.

Emily swallowed, mouth dry and nervous. She hadn’t actually been on the payroll, and the woman probably had all the right in the world to that little stack of cash she had gained in six hours.

But the woman simply tapped the bills into a neat pile before reaching for an envelope on her desk. She slipped the bills into it before she neatly scooped the loose change into the paper folds. A fat black marker was uncapped, and she turned to look at Emily with an expectant look. “What’s your name, girl?”

She started, not expecting the question in the slightest. “Emily! My name’s Emily, ma’am. Emily Johnson.”

The old woman shrugged. “Well, Emily Johnson. Looks like you just worked a full six-hour shift with no breaks. Not bad. You’re on for Monday through Friday, 10 am to 7 pm. Sundays we’re closed, and Saturdays aren’t until you’ve got a bit more experience under your belt.” She scrawled something large across the envelope before reaching for a fatter one under the desk. Carefully, the old woman took a calculator out of a drawer and started tapping away. Once she was done, she sighed and took a fat stack of cash out of the leather bag, licking her thumb again before she counted out more bills to slip into a second paper envelope.

Emily almost cried when the woman handed her both envelopes with a crooked grin. “Thank… Thank you so much! I won’t let you down ma’am, I promise!”

The old woman shrugged. “Meemaw. The girls around here call me Meemaw. I remember that look you’ve got. I don’t do handouts, Emily Johnson. I’ll work you like a dog and then some, and you’ll thank me for it. But the pay’s fair and the food’s free once a day. You won’t get any government benefits out of me, but I’ll do you right.”

Emily swallowed. Tears pricked at the corners of her eyes before she couldn’t hold back any longer. And there she stood, in a dingy backroom office of a restaurant that was clearly a tourist trap, bawling her eyes out before an old Cajun crone.

The woman rested her chin on a hand, propped herself up on the edge of her desk as she waited for Emily to cry herself out. “You got that wild-eye look about you, Emily Johnson. You running from something or to something?”

She wiped her tears from her face after a long moment, hazel eyes rimmed with red and cheeks stinging. “I think I’m lost. And I don’t know what else to do.” Emily wasn’t lying. Yesterday morning she had been in one place for one moment, talking to her best friend on the phone before she had opened a door and stepped out into somewhere else entirely. By the time she had noticed what had happened, about when the call had dropped and all she had was silence where her friend should have laughed, it had already been too late. The door was gone and she was standing on a curb staring at a bus with an ad that shouldn’t have existed plastered on its side.

Meemaw, as she so wanted to be called, tapped the edge of the desk in an absent gesture for Emily to pull up a corner. “If you’re not running, you mind telling me why I just had a waitress working for six hours straight with what is clearly everything you own on?”

Emily perched herself gingerly. “I… how did you know?”

All she got was a laugh, the full-bodied cackle of an old woman who had all the time in the world to be mysterious. “Oh Emily Johnson, you have lost puppy written all over your face. You’re not from here, are you? Every girl on this side of the city knows Meemaw only hires the kind of girls who usually get their money on their backs. Or worse.” She pointed at Emily, her fingers surprisingly steady as she pinned her with a glare. “You got a man after you?”

She couldn’t help the bark of laughter. “Oh. Oh no. Never.”

Meemaw raised an eyebrow, decidedly unamused. “Woman after you then?”

“Oh, no. I’m… single. I don’t date. I’ve never-”

“Well, that’s a shame. Pretty girl like you? You should be batting them off with sticks.” The old woman leaned back with a wince. “Listen, I’m just an old woman trying to help these girls do something better with their lives. If you need that, you can have this job. But if you don’t, if you got somewhere to go back to with a safe roof over your head, you walk right out my restaurant and let some other girl who  _ needs _ this have this job.”

Emily gripped her two envelopes with all the desperation she could manage. “Yesterday I was in Seattle. This morning I woke up in a cockroach-infested hostel that cost me almost half of all the money I have on me. I don’t know how I got here and I don’t know how I’m supposed to get home.  _ I need this job. _ ”

Meemaw opened another drawer and pulled out a wrinkled pack of cigarettes, lighting one with a fancy metal lighter she made appear from the depths of her pockets. “Good. I don’t do charity, Emily Johnson. Now git before I change my mind about you.”

Emily was quick to hop off the desk and get out of the office, only turning once to mumble her thanks before she fled out the back door of the restaurant.

The other waitress, the pretty one with the kind eyes, leaned up against the wall. She faced the almost full dumpster in the alley behind the restaurant and almost lazily slid her phone back into her pocket. “So? Meemaw give you the what-for?”

Emily shoved her two envelopes full of cash into her purse before she nodded. “I think… I think I got the job?”

The woman laughed, tossing her blonde hair over her shoulder. “If she told you to come back, then you got the job. I’m Margo by the way. I’ve got the breakfast, brunch, and lunch crowd. What’d she get you for?”

“Uh… I think… brunch, lunch, and dinner?”

Margo nodded her head a bit and clicked her tongue against her teeth. “Not bad. She must have been impressed. She count your tips for you?”

Emily folded her arms across her stomach and tried to shrink away from the blonde. “Yeah. She said… I had to really need this job to get it.”

“Yeah. Meemaw tries to do us right. Most of the morning girls? We got kids.” She gave a wry smile. “She tell you why she hires us?”

Emily shook her head, tucking a few escaped curls behind her ear. “I... I think she did but I don’t get it. She asked me if I was running from someone though.”

Margo pushed herself off the wall and dusted herself off. “Yeah. Some of us have some backstory. Look, you got a place to stay? You’re one of Meemaw’s now, and we do right by each other here.” She had a stern look in her eye, the kind that dared Emily to turn her down.

“Uh… I’m in a hostel? It’s… it’s not bad?”

Margo shook her head. “Here’s how it works newbie. First month or so, you crash on a couch until you get enough under your belt to survive. Then you get your own place. Ain’t nothing free here, honey. You’re newest, so you gotta help the next one, all right?”

Emily nodded. “Pay it forward?”

Margo grinned at her. “Now you’re gettin’ it. C’mon, you’re crashing with me. You got anything that needs picked up?”

She looked down and tried not to wince. “This… this is it.”

Margo clicked her tongue against her teeth again before she looped her arm around Emily’s shoulders. “Right. I’ve got some clothes that’ll fit you for now. Got ‘em from the girl before me. She’s got a man now, treats her right. But after the baby she couldn’t fit any of it, so she left it to me for the next.”

Emily nodded again. There was a system here among these women, and she was just here to reap the benefits. “Ok, so… then when I’m done I save it for whoever else?”

At that, Margo started guiding Emily to the bus stop. “Well I’ll be damned, we got us a smart one. You’ll get the hang of it. What’s your name, newbie?”

Emily fiddled with her envelopes through her purse, almost as if the mere presence of money would soothe her nerves. Everything she had was what she carried, and it wasn’t much. But Meemaw and Margo seemed like they understood at least a little bit, the bare bones of what reality dictated could happen. “I’m Emily. It’s… nice to meet you.”

Margo laughed as the bus pulled up. “C’mon then Emily. Let’s get you set up for the night. We’ll get you some things at the corner store, figure out what you need to get started on.”

There it was, kindness in its purest form with not a single thing asked about the who and the why. All the women of Meemaw’s needed to know was that she was in trouble, and once she was out of trouble she’d help someone else get out of trouble. It made sense, in its own convoluted kind of way. She stepped up onto the bus behind Margo, frowning as the other woman swiped her card twice to pay both fares.

The other woman tilted her head as she stared at Emily, pulling herself into a seat with an uncoordinated kind of grace. “And?”

“Bus fare until I get on my feet, then I pay bus fare for the next?”

Margo laughed again. “No, that one’s on me. You’re paying me back once you get your own pass though. I’m guessing you don’t have one yet.”

Emily rather liked the way Margo laughed. It was a warm thing, a live little creature that wiggled its way into her ears with a fluffy tingle. “No, no I don’t,” she sighed as she dropped into the seat next to Margo. “I don’t really have anything.”

The other woman waved her hand. “That’s all right. A lot of us didn’t. I didn’t, that’s for sure. Where you from, Emily?”

“Seattle. You?”

Margo stared at her before she patted her arm. “You’re a long way from home. I’m from around Arlington. Always promised I’d make it to Hollywood, and all I got was the capital.”

Emily smiled at the joke, delivered in the most deadpan tone she had ever heard. “Yeah, I know that one. I always thought I’d like… be something. One day anyway.”

“We all do. Oh, honey, we all do.” Margo patted her arm once more in a blatant show of understanding before she lapsed back into silence.

The rest of the bus ride was spent in quiet contemplation, that kind of silence that was heavy and yet still companionable. It was as if neither woman wanted to break it, and Emily spent most of the ride picking at the skin on her thumb out of nerves. The bus filled up slowly, then emptied just as slowly, and Margo jerked her head towards the door when it was their stop. Then it was another thirty-minute wait for the next bus, and they chugged along merrily towards their final destination.

Margo had them get off two stops before their actual stop, taking a brief detour to load Emily’s arms up with plastic bags full of things like spare underwear and toiletries. “You’re a nice girl, but I draw the line at sharing my toothbrush. Or my deodorant.”

Emily had actually laughed at that before she picked up a familiar blue plastic tube. “Aw, you don’t want to smell like Va Va Vanilla?”

Margo snorted and threw a box of toothpaste into their handbasket. “Not unless you want to sleep on the floor instead of my perfectly good couch.”

She shuddered dramatically. “With all your dirty socks? No thank you.” Emily had to pull a few wrinkled twenties out of one of her envelopes to pay for the bags upon bags of things Margo insisted she needed in her life. Margo even slapped her own bills on the pile and winked at her.

“Consider this my welcome to the east coast gift. Can’t believe you don’t even have chapstick in that purse of yours,” Margo whined as she peeled the thin cardboard from the plastic seal, tossing it all in the garbage as she brandished her new weapon against Emily’s chapped lips.

The walk back to Margo’s apartment was cheerful, even if they huddled together like two best friends hiding secrets. Margo had shown Emily the can of pepper spray on her keyring and told her to stick close in case something happened. Emily didn’t want to take any chances and had simply nodded before pressing close to Margo’s side. Walking in an unfamiliar city in the dark was not Emily’s idea of a good time, nor would it ever really be if the prickles on the back of her neck had anything to say about it.

Margo unlocked her front door with a dramatic wave of her hand, throwing the door open with a bright smile. “Ta-da! Welcome to Casa Richards. Mi casa e su casa and all that. Shoes go by the door.” She nudged her well-worn black shoes off with her toes, kicking them gracelessly into a tiny pile of shoes near the door.

Emily followed suit, albeit with much less enthusiasm. She followed Margo into the little apartment with her arms laden with bags. Margo flipped a few light switches before she pointed imperiously at the tiny table shoved under an equally tiny window, and Emily took that to mean that her bags should be set on the plywood surface. It wasn’t much to look at, but Emily couldn’t really be picky.

Margo had opened up her apartment to her out of the kindness of the former prostitute’s heart, and the other woman didn’t seem like the sort who let people into her private sanctum all that easily. It was almost like the shiny new chain locks and panels implied that Margo didn’t want company, and the dull aluminum baseball bat with the hefty dent beside the fridge just confirmed Emily’s suspicions. The other woman caught where Emily was looking and grinned rakishly. “You know, we’ve all got some kind of trouble.”

Emily could only nod, stray wisps of curls escaping from the haphazard ponytail she had tried to tame her mane into. “Is it… the bad kind of trouble?”

A shrug was her only answer. “He wasn’t last time. And the boys across the hall let him know his welcome will be far from warm.”

She gulped, fingers tightening on the crinkling plastic bag handles. “But is it-”

“Safe? Honey, this is the Projects. Nothing here is safe.” Margo opened the fridge door and pulled a slim glass bottle out from its depths. “You want a beer?” She shrugged at Emily’s swift shake of her head and popped the top off with the bottle opener nailed to her wall. Margo took a long sip before she waved her other hand in the general direction of the front door. “But here? We got a good thing going. The boys across the hall are decent people. They work long nights and I bring them a little something from Meemaw’s a couple times a week. The Martinez boys don’t like hearing women scream you see, and their mama raised them right.”

Now that Emily could understand. The fear of the mythical chancla had been pressed into her at an early age, and it seemed to have been the same for the Martinez boys. Though perhaps their association had been far closer than hers had been. Either way, she understood how manners got a head start in these sorts of close quarters. Emily nodded and turned back towards her bags, carefully sorting out the contents on the tiny table’s surface.

Margo disappeared around the corner, returning with a rickety plastic thing that she wheeled along. “The girl a couple before you, she left this. It’s not great, but it’ll do you for now.” She set it up against the wall, just past the old plasma screen tv that still had the pawnshop sticker on its side, and flourished her hand at it like a bad magician pulling a rabbit from a hat. “Tada! One dresser just for you. You can take it with you when you go.”

Emily stared at it for a long moment, not comprehending exactly what she was looking at. It looked like a stack of plastic tubs held together with what looked like PVC pipes and strips of plastic. Some part of her brain recognized having seen them in dorm rooms in the later part of her college years. This was a shelf, a cheap one, but it was lined with marble shelf liner so that the clear plastic couldn’t be seen through, and it would work rather well for her unmentionables.

A large plastic garbage bag was deposited on the couch in front of her, followed by a second after a long moment. Margo pointed to each bag with the top of her beer bottle, sipping as she went. “That one’s got shirts and I think some dresses. The other one has like, pants and shit.”

There was so much thrown at her so fast Emily could barely process it. Her evening devolved into sorting clothes into what did and didn’t fit, peeling open plastic packages to deposit the contents in drawers. Laundry day was established on Tuesdays, and they would take turns on who would go down to the dark and questionable laundry room and wrestle with the machines. Margo had grinned at that, folding a shirt that had Stark Expo 2011 blazoned bright across its front. “I’ll wash this week so you can get settled. You doing all right so far honey?”

Emily shrugged. “I dunno yet. I think I’m still trying to process what’s going on.” She sat cross-legged on the floor, a pile of neatly folded shirts next to her. “I just… this isn’t what I expected.”

Margo shrugged. “You know, most of us didn’t. But Meemaw… she’s something else. And after New York City… well she got a little upset. Not that any of us really blame her.”

There wasn’t much Emily could think of that would have been such a big deal. Maybe she was talking about 9/11, or maybe there was something else about the city that was horrible. She tilted her head slightly in confusion, eyebrows wrinkling as she tried to figure it out. “What… happened in New York?”

The other woman stopped folding to stare slack jawed at Emily. “You’re kidding right? You know, the aliens? Iron Man? Avengers? The Hulk showing up to literally punch an angry space whale over Broadway?”

She couldn’t help it. Emily started laughing hard enough for tears to leak out of the corners of her eyes, and she almost fell over from the force of her guffaws. “You know that was just a movie, right? Most of it was CGI.”

“Honey, where have you been for the last year?”

Margo wasn’t laughing.

Margo was, in fact, looking at Emily with a mix of pity and sorrow written large over her face. “Honey. That… that wasn’t a movie. A lot of people died.” She sighed before she pulled Emily over to her side of the couch, not letting the other woman have a chance to escape. “Come ‘ere. This… this is really important to us.”

Emily shook her head. “I don’t understand. How-”

“ _ Emily. _ Meemaw’s  _ entire family _ was in New York. They were sightseeing, took a train right up to Grand Central. They… Emily they didn’t come home.”

At least Margo was gentle, rubbed her fingers against the back of Emily’s shaking hand. “You remember the cook who let you sit on the bucket? That’s Enrique. His wife had just come in at JFK and was supposed to come back with Meemaw’s son.”

It was just a movie. She had taken her little brother to see it for Christmas, even bought him a costume off of Amazon that had light-up repulsors and said “I am Ironman,” when you hit the button on the chest. People didn’t die in movies.

Then again, people didn’t walk through a doorway in Seattle and show up in a back alley in Washington, D.C. years before.

Margo didn’t give Emily a chance to wiggle out of her grip. “Emily. You need to tell me, honey. We’re all honest here, and we’re not going to judge whatever trouble you came with.” She paused for a moment, licked her lips as if her mouth had gone dry. “Me? I’m here because my man liked the bottle. He liked the bottle and he didn’t like that I took my clothes off for a living. And when he didn’t like something, he hit hard.”

That wasn’t the same and Emily knew it.

“I was three months pregnant when aliens showed up in the sky over New York City. And I lived in Alphabet City. Do you understand?”

She didn’t want to understand.

“Emily, the world changed that day. The whole world. So… where were you?”

“I don’t… I wasn’t…” This wasn’t funny, not her. What could she say in the face of grief like that? Was there anything that could soothe the ache and make up for the fact that she was relying on these women for charity? “I wasn’t… here.”

She gripped Margo’s hands tight enough to leave little white marks. “Margo, yesterday morning I woke up in Seattle. I went to work like normal, and I stepped through a door. And yesterday morning I walked into an alley almost seven years ago.”

The other woman blinked, unsure of what she had just heard. “But that… doesn’t make any sense.”

Emily gave a bark of a laugh, halfway from anger to sobbing her eyes out. “ _ I know it doesn’t. _ But that’s my life now.”

Margo loosened her hands from Emily’s death grip so she could rub her fingers against the sides of her temples. “This is giving me a headache. So you’re not… there’s no man chasing you? No pimp, no ex-boyfriend? No… ex-girlfriend? No shadowy government agencies want to dissect you?”

“What?”

She raised her eyebrow so delicately that Meemaw would have been proud of the sass she didn’t say. “We had aliens fall out of the sky, Emily. Having one in Washington D.C. wouldn’t be that much of a stretch.”

Emily shook her head hard enough for her curled ponytail to smack her in the face. “Nope! I’m human! Or… I’m pretty sure I’m human. I was born in Seattle. I just… I’m from a here that’s not here? Does that even make any sense?”

Margo shrugged. “Well. That officially makes you the weirdest one of Meemaw’s girls. Wait, so what part of this exactly is a movie?”

“Uh… the superheroes part? I dunno, I just took my little brother to see them. It’s kind of been like, our thing. Ever since I went to college we haven’t been as close as we used to be.”

There was a long pause as both women processed that statement in vastly different ways. Emily took a moment to reminisce about the last time she had gone with her brother, how he had argued over whether or not putting a straw through the popcorn was really going to get the butter to go to the middle of the kernels. And then they had taken a moment to good-naturedly rib each other over which character was going to come back from the Snap. She remembered the way he had grown over the years and how he wanted so very badly to be like Tony Stark when he grew up.

Emily wondered when she would see her family again, and if anyone would ever believe her story when she made it home.

Margo saw someone numb to reality: a lost woman who picked at the fine edges of her tawny skin to peel the remnants of pale peach polish from her nails. When Emily smiled, it did not reach her eyes, her halting laugh a broken thing trying so hard to pretend it was fine. Here was a woman with a soul of a willow tree, someone who would bend before she broke. For her to think the world was a movie spoke of something truly terrible, and Margo could see why Meemaw had let her stay for even a fraction of a shift.

The older woman reached one milk pale arm behind her to grab the blanket folded across the back of the eye-searingly bad green paisley couch. She flipped it open around them and flapped her hand at Emily when the other woman tried to open her mouth to protest. “You hush. There’s been enough sad for today. You’re here now, and we’re gonna take real good care of you.”

Emily snuggled down into the thick flannel, glad for Margo’s steady warmth at her side. The waitress smelt like coffee and the mint gum she had popped into her mouth on the bus ride over, and she didn’t begrudge Emily’s mindless silence. There weren’t any words to say between the two of them, not when one thought the other was crazy and the other still wasn’t sure it was real.

They watched something mindless on the screen, flicking back and forth over channels that made Margo snort out a laugh every time Emily wrinkled her nose at the selection. “I’m sorry I don’t have that good cable, honey. I don’t usually stay home long enough for it to matter.”

Emily made a curious sound on PBS, and they settled in for the night in a parody of a sleepover. Neither one of them wanted to admit they had used the other as a pillow in the night, and Margo would be damned if she paid any attention to the wet patch of tears Emily had left on her shirt.

Margo only left to go to work the next day, but not before she had given Emily the tour of her apartment proper. The bathroom was small and the counters cluttered with Margo’s sixteen step beauty regime (one that she had offered to share with a shellshocked Emily), porcelain chipped and the counters laminate. Not that Emily really complained, but she did make a horrified face at the contents of Margo’s dirty old fridge. The other woman had merely shrugged while Emily swore her undying vengeance upon the colonies that had taken up residence between the remains of General Tso and Colonel Sanders. Before Margo had left, the woman had triumphantly pulled a cherry blossom tree patterned room divider out of her closet for Emily to at least divide out her own private space in the living room.

Emily stayed behind, curled up in borrowed pajama pants two inches too long but well worn and comfortable. She flicked mindlessly through the channels on the television until she stopped on some cartoon she had watched once with her brother so very long ago.

And she cried, oh how she cried. She cried until her eyes were red and puffy, cheeks sore from the salt-crust on her skin. For two days she cried, and Margo kept her plied with takeout from Meemaw’s and a promise that her job was still waiting for her when she was done.

Emily cried herself out, and then she picked herself off the couch and scoured the entire apartment clean while Margo was at work. She washed every scrap of dirty clothing she could find, and some that she wasn’t sure on, folded it all neatly and hung it in Margo’s closets. There wasn’t much she could do with just crying, and there was only so much she could do when the roof over her head was provided by someone else entirely.

So she went to work, waited tables and faked a smile until her cheeks ached. Emily avoided going out at night with the cooks, preferring instead to go home with Margo each night. Margo always left around nine, came back smelling like alcohol strong enough to burn away her demons for one more night. It was hard at first, like all new things in the winter tended to be, but she found her own space and filled it the best she could.

Emily and Margo didn’t make a lot of money as waitresses, but they made do with what they had. The little hidden safe that Margo had made Emily buy was safely nestled in its hidden spot Emily refused to breathe a word about to anyone. And slowly, ever so slowly, her little nest egg grew and grew until Emily could breathe a sigh of relief.

Margo pulled Emily into bed with her six times a week, and sometimes it was simply just to hold someone to hear their heart beating in their chest. And it was Margo who kissed Emily first, a sticky thing that tasted like vodka and regret. But they were lonely, and Margo couldn’t stand the thought of going back to the life she had before.

Once, when Margo was mostly sober and they sipped their pumpkin spice lattes at the tiny table, Emily had asked what Margo wanted them to be.

“Anything you want, honey,” she had whispered against Emily’s palm, a kiss fluttered over her pulse and a promise besides. Margo had been bundled up in that ridiculous sweater she loved, half holes and half cable knit, with her legging clad legs shoved up under the bottom so her chin could rest on her knees. But she still wore the pair of socks that Emily had gotten her for Thanksgiving, and she still danced around in her underwear like no one was watching.

Margo was a hurricane in a human body, and Emily could only hope to be dragged along for the ride. There was more love and laughter in her pinky finger than most people had in their entire bodies, and when she smiled she lit up the room. It was only inevitable that one cold night in December she pulled Emily just a bit too close into her orbit.

And oh how the sun burned when she was that close, reached its heat into her chest and made Emily see stars. What they had wasn’t really love, just two warm bodies sating a need that neither wanted to admit the other had. But for Emily it was a benediction in Margo’s soft embrace, like something in the universe had said that she could have some joy even in this disaster.

They spent Christmas at Meemaw’s with all the other girls, even those who had come before them and moved on back out into the real world. The old woman had shaken her head at the collection of women who swarmed her home and turned it festive and warm for a whole week. She called them all her grandchildren and Emily’s heart ached to know that this mistake had given her such goodness.

Emily had joined some of the younger women in Meemaw’s living room, tucking her knees to her chin like Margo next to her, and they listened to stories of a world long gone. Stories of heroes who fought villains both real and imaginary, of sacrifice and love, stories printed on crinkled and worn old newspaper attached to the thick scrapbooking paper.

And if Captain America’s face stared out at them from faded newsprint while Emily shyly kissed Margo under the mistletoe, no one in that room would dare to think he would have anything ill to say that Christmas Day.


End file.
